Prized Teacher

Thank you very,very much, he said,smiling broadly,according to students who were there and had presented him with a card and a spread of baked goods. Well eat this during the break. But for now,lets start class.

Since he won the Nobel on October 7,Vargas Llosa has been at the centre of a whirlwind of attentiona revolution in my life, he said in an interview. Its really fantastic to experience directly what globalisation means, he said,even though it has been very comic in some cases.

He had one offer to invest the prize moneyabout 1.5 millionin an ice cream company. And someone writing from a remote village,he said,asked him to pay for an operation.

But amid the chaos,this high-flying international literary celebrity has faithfully kept up his duties as a college professor here. Twice a week he wakes up in his Manhattan apartment at 5:30 am to prepare for his classes,one on Borges and the other on creative writing and techniques of the novel,before boarding a train.

The cultural environment at Princeton is great because there are many writersJoyce Carol Oates,Michael Wood, Vargas Llosa said,adding that he enjoys riding the train back and forth from Manhattan.

Vargas Llosa has settled into a happy New York life with his wife,Patricia. They take an hourlong walk in Central Park each morning,usually around 8. He spends afternoons at the New York Public Library,which he adores for its ample space and generous natural light. Everyone is in a rush in New York,even in restaurants and in cafes, he said. You dont have the serenity. That,I think,is very important in order to read.

Teaching has been a part of Vargas Llosas life,on and off,since the 1960s,when he had posts at universities in Britain,and later at Harvard,Columbia and Georgetown. He was a visiting lecturer at Princeton in 1992 and returned this fall.

On Tuesday afternoon he arrived for his usual Borges seminar. Resting his elbows on the desktop,he began an hour of free-floating Borges analysis. The first half of class is typically devoted to his lecture,delivered while seated,with only the occasional glance at his notes.

There is a gravitas to his way of speaking and presenting ideas, said student Julia Kaplan,21. He likes us to deconstruct the stories and really look closely at what is the narrator doing,what tense is the story in,what level of reality is the story at. Hes a wonderful professor.

Both seminars are taught in Spanish,to classes that include many from countries like El Salvador and Mexico. For his students,holding a seat in Vargas Llosas class has become the equivalent of winning the academic lottery,earning them the sudden envy of friends and fellow students.

This fall was supposed to be a quiet sojourn in New York,said Vargas Llosa,who sometimes lives in Peru and sometimes in Spain or wherever his writing and teaching take him. That changed early on the morning he received the phone call from Stockholm telling him he had won the prize.

I was absolutely convinced that I wouldnt win the Nobel Prize, he said. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with,lets say,socialist ideas,and that was not my case.

Rafael Romero,a 22-year-old junior from Miami,said that on the first day of class Vargas Llosa said that in 50 or 100 years,if the world remembers only one Spanish-language author,it would be Borges.

The irony is that the author were studying never won the Nobel Prize,and all of a sudden our teacher just won the Nobel Prize, Romero said.